D&D General Have you ever retired a character?

[Older Beholder]

As the title says.
I'm not talking about writing an ending for your character when the campaign is over.
Have you ever retired a character and made a new one instead to continue playing?

If so, why?

I've only ever retired a character once, (that I can recall) he fell in love with an NPC and retired from the adventuring life.

I've put this in a DnD thread, but feel free to mention other systems as well.

 

[Kurotowa]

A couple of times, over the decades. If I feel like the PC just isn't suitable for the campaign, or find I don't enjoy either their personality or mechanics, I'll talk with the DM about retiring the PC and swapping to a new one. But that's the most severe step. Other times, I've just arranged a mechanical revision while keeping the character going.

 

[James Gasik]

In a long-running campaign, I retired a character who had become a demigod, simply because I thought adventuring as a god was a bit silly. I had another character become an immortal (basically the same thing with different rules) who I did retire, but later went back to only because they had a lot of unfinished business I wanted to resolve. Eight years later and I still haven't managed to get them back into retirement.

I've had a character forced into retirement in an online V:tM game, something that still leaves a stale taste in my mouth- I'd been worried about their power level and had asked the staff if they were a problem, and was told they weren't repeatedly. Then I got busy IRL and had to take a month off from the game. When I came back, the entire game had been rebooted- some characters were allowed to stay with "rebalanced" (ie, nerfed) stats.

Mine was not. When I asked why, apparently my character was one of the reasons for the reboot. Like, I could see their logic, obviously, because I'd had concerns myself, but they first dismissed my concerns, then went ahead and booted me out the instant my back was turned.
: (

The only other time was when I tried to retire my Cleric in a 3e game where they had been branded a heretic and the archbishop who hated my character kept sending powerful assassins that my party ended up having to deal with, so I was ready to walk off into the sunset, but the party insisted they would stand with me.

To be fair, that was before two characters died and ended up reincarnated after a fight with a Retriever (powerful demonic construct able to plane shift, hard to kill, and can unleash nasty eye rays), but by that point the game was on it's last legs- we had one more session after that where we fought a Remorhaz, and then the DM balked at the thought of us using 5th-level spells and prestige classes so the game went on a permanent "hiatus" while he "re-evaluated" the campaign.

 

[Sulicius]

I had been playing a PC for 4 years, and I felt like her story was done. I had lost the interest in her for a while.

She was an elderly dwarf, so in agreement with the DM, I rolled a d100 after every long rest to see if she’d pass in her sleep.

Right when we saved her home town and I had cool role play, thanking everyone for their efforts, she passed.

I couldn’t have made it so perfect if I tried.

 

[definiteFreakyFishGuy]

Yes, I retired my first real DND 5e character after about a year or so. I had participated in a DND 5e game before, but I didn't really know what was going on then. So this was my first real earnest attempt at playing a TTRPG.

When I started, I was obsessed. I had spent so much time on this character's. I wrote a novella for his back story. I spent time imagining how he'd speak and move. Then one day, I stopped feeling good about playing the character. So I worked with my GM to basically write him off: he succumbed to a curse, and he left the party so that his party wouldn't hurt anyone else.

I took a break for a few months, then rejoined the campaign with a gag character.

 

[AlViking]

Sort of? But that's only because I use a persistent campaign world that I share with my wife for most of my campaigns. So some characters "retire" become NPCs. A significant amount of time can pass between campaigns so for some we decided a story arc for the rest of their lives, others just fade away.

I've had players retire their character simply because they wanted variety and that's been done in a number of ways from death to just opening up a bookstore.

 

[Muh]

I retired a character only once because I was disappointed with multiple aspects of the character

• The character was a battle master fighter and thus quite limited outside of combat
• His personality wasn't very assertive, something which made him not work so well outside of combat. Characters with little narrative influence need to be played assertively to compensate
• I didn't like playing a Dwarf with the limited movement speed.

 

[Tonguez]

Kinda, I tend to like characters with family and life connections (like Orbril owning a Circus), Orbril eventually became a University Professor (Chair in Applied Alchemy) and retired in the Fae realm

I had a Paladin character who become leader of a city and thus retired from adventuring.

I also had a barbarian character who found himself in a tavern when an Orc gang came in demanding extortion money and harrassing the tavern keepers daughter/barmaid. My character killed the orc then proposed being given a 20% stake in the tavern and marriage to the barmaid in return for the party protecting them from bandit reprisals. The party didnt think it was appropriate, but it was in the characters personality and he promised to be a good husband and defender

Anyway sometimes the demands of life mean that they dont fit with ongoing adventuring so they'll retire as NPCs and a new character takeover

 

[DEFCON 1]

Once in a 7th Sea campaign a couple decades ago. I had already had two PCs die in the campaign and thus went much further afield with the design and background of the third one to try something really new... a stealth assassin member of Die Kreuzsritter. That design turned out to be a mistake based upon where our party was at the time and how our GM ended up ruling stealth (we hadn't really had any stealth characters up to that point and thus none of us knew how the GM ruled on actions of that sort.) Pretty soon both my GM and I agreed that the character wasn't a really good fit for this particular party and thus let me quickly retire him and I created a fourth PC (that ended up working out the best of all four that I played.)

 

[Shiroiken]

Several times. Usually it's because the character no longer fit the campaign, but I did have a more recent one where I simply got tired of playing the character. One even started to have a negative impact on my mental health IRL, so I worked with the DM to retire the character.